Marti Cifuentes' squad rotation was not a conspicuous success in winnable games against Plymouth and Sheff Wed, and now we now face much tougher challenges against Southampton, Millwall and Ipswich in a hectic Christmas schedule.
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It is impossible to look at what happened to Queens Park Rangers last week without an immense amount of frustration at what might have been, and also no little foreboding at what it means for the outcome of this season.
Two victories were there for the taking. I was seriously impressed with Plymouth, and thought they’d have beaten us with a full compliment of players, but without an away win all season and being asked to play for an hour with ten men that should have been a win. Sheff Wed were absolute dog chocolate. If that’s them improved, with 58-year-old Callum Patterson lumbering about up top, then good God only knows what they must have looked and played like under the joke that was Xisco Munoz. To be as slapdash as we were in the second half, abandoning all ambition to play Marti Cifuentes’ style and score more goals in favour of punting the ball and trying to hold what we had while picking up a plethora of daft yellow cards, was bitterly disappointing. We ended up spooked by their four-up-top mega press and lost the game. Even when the meltdown was occurring both Sam Field and Osman Kakay had chances they should have scored, showing that if we only we would just put a foot on the ball and pass it progressively, as the new manager wants us to do, there were goals (plural) there for the scoring.
Had we achieved wins, when we surely should have done, we’d now be eighteenth in the league. Plymouth would be below us, and searching for a new manager after the departure of Steven Schumacher. Sheff Wed would be five places and 12 points away – dead, to all intents and purposes. We’d be five wins from five, absolutely beside ourselves, upwardly mobile, supremely confident, sold out ground tomorrow with boisterous atmosphere and, most importantly, able to pick and choose which Christmas games to go for (Millwall, Cardiff) while sacking off and resting others (Southampton, Ipswich) so we’re all so much fresher and ready than our rivals to tackle a January in which we play entirely at home. By February we could be off and away. Instead I can see, hear and feel myself sitting here in April writing about that being the week when we knew the game was up. Not good enough to win the games we needed to stay in the league, even with all the confidence and momentum we had from three wins and a new manager and playing against relegation rivals in states of disarray.
If my grandma had wheels she’d have been a bike.
There are few things in modern football that bring the grumpy old men out more than new fangled continental coaches rotating winning teams. Even during a period of Christmas fixtures which I, as an absolute traditionalist in this instance and lover of football at this time of year, would describe as excessive, any Johnny Foreigner coming in here and making a few changes after a win to try and cope with a four game week can expect an aggressively limp bout of impotent dick energy from some Daily Mail reader reminding them Aston Villa won the European Cup using 14 players, and how on their first day down t'pit they worked a 72 hour shift and then walked home 43 mile in us bare feet.
Personally, standing there behind that goal at Hillsborough last week, willing the time away but knowing we weren’t doing anywhere near enough to see it out, I too would much rather us have gone hell for leather in those two matches and then sacked off tomorrow against Southampton and Ipswich this week, both of which we’re unlikely to win, if necessary. Let’s, though, look at some of the thought process behind Cifuentes decisions last week, while at all times remembering that when he picked a team none of us would ever have selected in a million years at Preston a fortnight before, and won, he was hailed as some sort of soothsayer. Last week's attempt to rotate through it didn’t work as well as the previous, but you’d certainly give Cifuentes marks for showing his working.
Firstly, QPR are notoriously shit in three game weeks, particularly the third game of three. Cifuentes won two out of three (Stoke H, Preston A) in his first one of these as our manager. Some going because, over the previous two years and four managers, we had failed to win 24 (16 defeats and eight draws) of the 33 third games we’d played in a three-game week. It was a persistent handicap of Mark Warburton’s side even when that team was playing well and pushing on towards the top of the league. The disastrous Championship double inflicted upon us by Peterborough both occurred in game three of three game weeks – the second despite us shifting it to Sunday, so chronic had the problem become and so desperate was the manager in his search for a solution to it.
Secondly, it wasn't a bad idea to try and get what little pace there is in this team on from the start on a big pitch against a super high press at Hillsborough. Neither Smyth nor Armstrong made an impact, but the logic was sound.
Thirdly, as a new manager, you want to come in and show everybody has a fresh start and a clean slate, and so people need to be given an opportunity to play, otherwise the words are hollow and you end up with the same bitter bus load of sidelined professionals kicking their heels that existed before. They have to believe he’s sincere when he says everybody gets a fresh shot at this and then it’s up to them to take the opportunity. Charlie Kelman was given a chance against Plymouth, didn’t take it, and that decision now looks a bit cavalier. On the other hand, few would have wanted Ziyad Larkeche to ever see the light of day again after the Blackburn debacle yet he’s come in and done so well recently people are now talking about his concussion against Plymouth as a big moment in the game. Cifuentes has to be allowed to give everybody a go and work out what he’s got – that’s not ideal in the middle of a season when battling relegation, but then that’s entirely our fault and not his. Some of it will work, some of it won’t, we have to wear that.
Fourthly, while Mark Warburton was really very good with the whole sport science thing and would never be swayed by populist opinion or crowd noise, two QPR managers either side of him suffered through burning out a small pool of talented first teamers. Steve McClaren picked the same side remorselessly once he’d been allowed to loan in his ‘team of men’ at great expense, and in the first half of the season we had moments like three wins in a week against Ipswich, Sheff Wed and Villa, or a 3-2 thriller against Brentford, or three wins over Christmas including a first ever at Nottingham Forest, where you thought he, and we, were onto something. The team, particularly Ebere Eze, were complete baggage through a second half of the season in which we only won three times and he got the sack after consecutive home defeats to bottom two Rotherham and Bolton. With Mick Beale I think there’s a legitimate discussion to be had about exactly how many of the injuries we apparently suffered after he left were genuine injuries at all and not just the mercenary little fuckers he saddled us with showing their true selves (no surprise to see Ethan Laird picking up a nice Joel Lynch-style two month hammy injury for Christmas up at Birmingham, Tyler meanwhile has troubled himself for 61 minutes of action at St Andrew’s so far). Nevertheless, he did openly admit in a meeting at the training ground he’d picked players (Willock, Amos) for the home game against Middlesbrough against the advice of the medical team and left them on the field for longer than he was told to "get this thing going”. A huge part of the collapse we suffered after he left was because so many of the players he’d flogged to begin with weren’t available after Christmas.
Cifuentes has inherited a team where you know Chris Willock is one of the best players, but you also know he’s had three bad hamstring injuries in two seasons and hadn’t scored for a year prior to the new manager coming in. Willock recently scored three goals in three games under Cifuentes. Jake Clarke-Salter has looked our best player, for me, in this new style and shape. Of the team’s last 14 wins, Clarke-Salter has played in ten. Steve Cook has played in four of the five wins we’ve had this season. Jimmy Dunne, meanwhile, has only completed one win this season, at Preston, and while he was involved in another, against Stoke, he was withdrawn with the visitors leading 2-1 with ten men. He’s lost 20 of his last 35 appearances and won just five. Cifuentes will know he needs to get Willock and Chair together wherever possible, and he’ll know Clarke-Salter and Cook are our centre back pairing, like we all do. He’ll also know the only reason Clarke-Salter plays for QPR in the first place is he can’t get fit. If he could play 40 games a season he wouldn’t be here. Those ten wins he’s played in go all the way back to last August, which shows how seldom we win but also how little he plays. Cook has had no pre-season and already missed games through pulls and strains. The manager knows Reggie Cannon is his best right back, but also knows he's done no pre-season either.
I’d like to have blitzed those two games last week, but there’s no guarantee it would have yielded two wins, and no guarantee the key injury prone players we’ve got would have made it through them unscathed. Would you rather one point and Clarke-Salter still fit, or six and him out until April? We can’t criticise McClaren and Beale, as we did, for running the plane on take-off power and then trying to wash their hands of it when the thing blew up on them, then also criticise Cifuentes for doing the opposite.
Fifthly, similarly, one of the final straws those of us who travel away with the team had with Ainsworth was this idea there are games at Championship level that QPR are simply lucky to even be playing, and could never really ever hope of winning. That was particularly prevalent towards the end of his reign at Leeds and West Brom, where we tried and failed to shithouse nil nils from basic midweek league games, all the while being gaslit into believing that we – Queens Park Rangers – were some tiny, insignificant, lamb to the slaughter in the mighty abattoir of Elland Road or The chuffing Hawthorns. I can’t now, in good faith, sit here and say I’d rather us go all out for the Plymouth and Sheff Wed games and sack off Southampton and Ipswich, because it’s only fucking Southampton and Ipswich and I hated that Ainsworth attitude, and Redknapp before him, of basically giving up on games because we’re only little old QPR. I love Cifuentes’ attitude, mantra and chat about how it’s only the Championship, we’re a significant player in the Championship, and we should be going to win, all the time, in every game, regardless of who we’re playing. It’s a much needed shift in attitude and ethos, and you don’t shift attitude and ethos in team sport by saying one thing publicly and then doing another.
I think, mostly though, I just really like Cifuentes. He plays football and picks teams in the way I want football to be played and teams to be picked. He wants QPR to play as I want them to play. He’s exactly the sort of optimistic, front foot, progressive, modern manager I see getting jobs elsewhere and am very jealous of. So, I’ll give him all sorts of slack when it goes wrong, while of course ranting on after defeats because ranting on after defeats is what LoftforWords is here for. I looked at this team in Austria, and stood on the pitch after the Slavia Prague friendly listening to people involved with it talk about it, then I saw us on day one at Watford, and I didn’t see how we’d ever win a game again. I said at the time if Ainsworth kept that team up he should have a statue commissioned on Batman Close, based largely on the fucktastrophe he inherited. Well, Ainsworth at least had a summer, and some budget, and chose to do this with it. Cifuentes inherited not only Ainsworth’s inheritance, but what Ainsworth had decided to do with it. Transfer window closed, tiny amount of budget headroom already spent… He’s already doing way more than his predecessor with it, and what’s more he’s talking and acting like a guy who wants to put exactly the sort of philosophy shift and long term plan we’ve been so desperately lacking in place.
There are going to be weeks like last week, not because he’s rotated the team but because the team fundamentally isn’t very good. They were losing for Warburton, Beale, Critchley and Ainsworth before him. This group of players keep showing you what they are, and that cowardice and incompetence was really on show at Hillsborough when a poor team sticking four up front and pressing high was enough to intimidate them into going long and trying to see a game out. This lot will lose, and keep losing. Maybe we’ll have enough to stay up, maybe we won’t. Either way, we need a fundamental, root and branch review of the entire footballing side of the business. Everything I’ve seen and heard from Cifuentes so far tells me he’s the man I want in the head coach role for that reset, whatever happens between here and May. Let's resolve not to drive him out of town for not getting a symphony from the bric a brac he's picked up here.
There will be other Sheffield Wednesdays. Many more, in fact. Possibly all the way down into League One. That’s where we are, where this squad is. I feel like the manager is now the best thing about us. A good ‘un, who will bring us back, from wherever we do eventually bottom out. And if not, here’s a spoiler, you won’t like the next guy’s team selections, squad rotation, substitutions or post match interviews any more than this one.
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With four games in a week comes four match previews to write over Christmas. I’m almost certain there’ll be a rant about Jurgen Klopp at some point, and how it’s definitely a Boxing Day match and FA Cup replay at Exeter exhausting his suspiciously asthma-riddled players rather than a summer spent playing Man Utd on a converted baseball diamond in Thailand. There will also be a very soppy outpouring about what a soul-sapping year it’s been following QPR around the country and trying to provide a professional level of coverage. How many mistakes I’ve made, how many stupid things I’ve said and written, how many people I’ve upset, how much I regret, how tired I am, but also how amazingly grateful I am for the support I receive for this website, fast approaching my twentieth year. It’s kept going by the Patreon, and there’s a terrific hour of round table discussion on there now for all three tiers of subscriber – please do sign up if you can, the lowest tier is £2.50 a month and it’s the only reason I keep going with this. Whether you do/can or don’t/can’t, I wish you and yours the most enjoyable and restful Christmas possible in these horrible, dark, often evil times. All of life and sport is cyclical, we will come out of this, together, in a positive direction, on and off the pitch. And in the meantime we’ll have each other, and our dearly beloved/delinquent Queens Park Rangers. You R’s.
Team News: Injury wise Morgan Fox, it seems, remains some way away from fitness. Jack Colback, too, remains sidelined with a muscle strain. A shame, really, because Sam Field’s poor miss at Sheff Wed, following similar chances at Rotherham and Norwich, suggest he could do with a rest after starting 21 of 22 league games this year, and all 46 last. Reggie Cannon was withdrawn at half time at Sheff Wed after picking up a booking and another knock as he attempts to get up t speed after a truncated pre-season. QPR play four times this week, expect rotation whether you like it or not.
Elsewhere: Honest Mick has had his PowerPoint out for the lads again and walked straight back into a plum Championship job despite failing miserably at Rangers and leaving QPR in an absolute state. "I want to be head coach,” he says, "I’ve no interest in managing the whole football club”, which is quite a departure from the guy who only took our job on the proviso Chair, Willock and Dieng were kept and he was allowed to sign loads of players he’d worked with before who subsequently downed tools when he left. After his previous two jobs were holed below the waterline by the quality of his summer recruitment drive, anybody would think he’s just saying whatever he thinks people at Sunderland need/want to hear to get himself another job. His first game is at home to Coventry tomorrow.
Plenty of managerial flux elsewhere in the division too. Stoke have once again been able to tempt a manager from a safe job at a great club where he’s doing well to come and join their basket case, presumably on the promise of an astronomical pay rise – Steven Schumacher leaving Plymouth this week in much the same way Alex Neil did Sunderland a year ago. He starts with a homer against fellow strugglers Millwall while Argyle set about life without him at home to Birmingham. Swansea thrusted Duffman in the direction of the exit before any of this, but are still searching for his replacement ahead of tonight’s home game with Preston Knob End. With one win and four defeats in six, and a 5-1 home loss to Watford last time out, it was already starting to feel like Ryan Lowe was about to become Championship managerial change 12/24 this season even before he started calling the supporters out for their relative lack of football expertise this week – one would think a defeat in South Wales tonight will finish him off.
Other games at the bottom for QPR to keep an eye on include Rotherham being read the last rites away at Leicester, resurgent Sheff Wed potentially pulling within a point of us at home to Cardiff and Huddersfield with a tough ask away to another upwardly mobile side in Norwich. Fingers crossed for not too much damage done there if we do indeed lose our game to Southampton. Rotherham’s bid to dig themselves out of the shit by adding free agents like Sam Clucas and Daniel Ayala outside the transfer window hasn’t been a conspicuous success. Ayala, sent off for two mindless first half bookings against Swansea, was then dismissed again on his return at Plymouth last week to get himself a nice suspension for the Christmas fixtures. Not since Joel Lynch himself was terrorising the good people of Shepherd’s Bush have we seen quite such a flagrant example of a ticket being bought on the Joel Lynch Christmas Express to Dubai as this one…
At the top the game of the day is obviously the televised lunchtime game at Elland Road between Leeds and Ipswich – Leeds one of the few teams to beat the Tractor Boys so far, winning 4-3 at Portman Road back in August, this of course the first round of return fixtures of the season. The play-off places are made up by West Brom, who have a tough trip to Middlesbrough albeit with the hosts now weighed down by injuries to a dozen first team players, and Hull, who go to Bristol City tonight. Two of those among the chasing pack, Blackburn and Watford, meet at Ewood Park.
We’ll do it all again on Tuesday. And Friday. THEN THE LARGE WOMEN AGAIN.
Referees: I’ve checked through all the Christmas appointments and our welcome dodging of Keith Stroud is set to continue into the New Year. This week, instead, it’s one of the EFL’s other longest serving referees Oliver Langford, who’s been doing QPR games for the best part of 15 years now. Details.
QPR: Having lifted themselves back into contention to stay up with three consecutive wins for the first time in a year, QPR have missed two chances to capitalise on that with one point from games against fellow strugglers Plymouth and Sheff Wed. Plymouth would have gone below Rangers in the Championship table with defeat at Loftus Road, but are now six places and six points ahead once more. Sheff Wed are within four points when a Rangers win at Hillsborough would have put the gap at ten.
In happier news, Rangers have taken seven points from their last three home games having only taken seven from the previous 17. They won games here against Stoke and Hull having only won two of the prior 24, and that was the first time they’d won consecutive matches at Loftus Road since October 2022. Marti Cifuentes has posted 12 points from eight games, as many as Gareth Ainsworth won in his first 15. We’ve kept four clean sheets in eight games having kept four in the whole of Ainsworth’s time in charge.
It perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise that we lost in Sheffield with QPR’s record when playing the third game in a three game week: four defeats, a draw and the one win at Preston this season; nine defeats, five draws and four wins going back to the start of last season; 16 defeats, eight draws and nine wins going back to the start of 2021/22. Prior to recording our Half Season Review on the Patreon this week Jack Supple and I were trying to remember the last time we’d melted down late in a game like that and it was, in fact, the Aguero game in 2012. Jack got in touch today to say: "The last time QPR lost a game that they were leading in as late as the 86th minute was the Aguero game v Man City in 2012: QPR leading 2-1 until 90th min/stoppage time then obvs lose. Some other games since then came close but the nearest example was versus Birmingham in February 2021 under Warbs when we led until 82nd min and had a mad few mins and lost – quite similar to last week really.”
These two sides haven’t met in the league since the 2013/14 Premier League season when a Sadio Mane injury time goal at Loftus Road sealed a Saints double. Prior to that QPR had held a pretty decent recent record, particularly at St Mary’s where they won three and lost none of their first five visits after Southampton left The Dell. Southampton have won three of the last four meetings at Loftus Road having won none of the previous seven going back to 1989/90.
Southampton: Two wins from the first 14 league games cost Gareth Ainsworth his job as QPR manager but the R’s were very unfortunate to lose their first meeting with Southampton at St Mary’s at the end of August. Paul Smyth, Ilias Chair, Sinclair Armstrong and Rayan Kolli all missed big chances for Rangers in a game where Asmir Begovic made a bad mistake for the opening goal at the other end. The Saints’ frailties were subsequently exposed by others – they lost their next four games, including a 5-0 at Sunderland and 4-1 at home to Leicester. Russell Martin’s side conceded 19 goals in their first eight games back at this level, including that five against Sunderland, and four to both Leicester and Norwich at home. They also went out of the League Cup 3-1 at League Two Gillingham.
Things have turned dramatically since then. Southampton arrive at Loftus Road unbeaten in 14 games and closing in on the club record run of 19. They’ve looked a little leggy away from home, with four draws in the last five games including ties at struggling Preston and Huddersfield, but it’s eight away games since they were last beaten on the road and they’ve won at Stoke, Hull and Millwall in that time. They arrive in W12 fresh from a 4-0 home win against Blackburn – a fifth home win in a row. Adam Armstrong, who scored the winner when these sides last met, has really cemented his reputation as one of those players too good for the Championship but not quite cutting it upstairs – he has 12 goals and six assists this season and is top scorer, having only scored four goals in 31 starts and 22 sub appearances for the club in the higher division. The Saints have scored nearly twice as many goals as QPR this season (37 v 20) but defensively there is only three goals difference and their total of 29 conceded is the worst in the top seven and more than Coventry (25) and Bristol City (24) have let in down in fourteenth and fifteenth. Taylor Harwood-Bellis has done plenty to tighten that up since August mind, plus the arrival of Colin Calderwood as a defensive coach – Harwood-Bellis, on loan from man City and with champions Burnley in this league last season, has only lost two of his 16 appearances for the club so far.
If QPR do happen to be in a positive position heading into the closing stages then there are more reasons to be fearful than simply last weekend’s collapse at Sheff Wed. Southampton have scored seven goals in stoppage time this season for a gain of eight points
Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s newly extended QPR collection here. SilverFoxQPR continues to lead the way and if that’s the case by 17.00 tomorrow then he’ll receive our prize for being top at Christmas. Let’s see what our reigning champion Aston got for us this week…
"The Wednesday and Plymouth games showed a few familiar failings of mentality and defensive frailty and, while Cifuentes is doing a great job still of counter-acting this, I worry Southampton will be too strong. I was hugely unimpressed with them when we played them earlier in the season and I don't rate Russell Martin particularly highly, but with the quality in their team it will be enough. Even if they beat us with pure vibes. 2-0 to Southampton.”
Aston’s Prediction: QPR 0-2 Southampton. No scorer.
LFW’s Prediction: QPR 1-2 Southampton. Scorer – Ilias Chair
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